Lost's Emergency Plane Landing Goes off the Runway

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Oct 30, 2009

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Last night's episode of Lost, "Namaste," opened with the our favorite pilot, Frank Lapidus, attempting to land Ajira flight 316 on an unfinished runway on Hydra Island, where the Dharma Initiative once housed a zoo full of animals. The pilot was able to bring the plane to a halt just off the unfinished, too-short runway without hurting any passengers (if you don't count the co-pilot, who died when a tree limb crashed through the windshield and impaled him). But just how much of that expert emergency landing was plausible, and how much was wishful thinking? We asked Pete Onorato, president of the Coalition of Airline Pilots Association, and US Airways pilot Ryan Twardowski to weigh in.

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In Twardowski's opinion, this scenario is one case where the show took a little artistic liberty, as Hollywood often does. While the flashing lights, audible warnings and terminology coming from the cockpit are definitely realistic, some of those terms aren't used properly. At the beginning of the crash scene, Lapidus says the plane's stalling and that it's lost power. "A stall is when the airplane stops producing lift and thus stops flying," explains Twardowski. "It's almost impossible to stall a commercial airliner, though [if it happens] the situation is recoverable if you have enough altitude to do so."

And of course, you also need working engines. Lapidus says the plane lost power, but a few seconds later, his solution for leveling from a too-steep descent is to call for more power. "If they had lost both motors it would take at least a couple of minutes to restart, bleeding airspeed they would have needed to avoid the mountain," explains Onorato. The co-pilot's ability to restart the engines and give Lapidus the power he needed to recover in mere seconds is completely unrealistic. "Then if they had restarted they would have already pushed the thrust levers forward for maximum emergency thrust and there would have been no room for 'more power'," says Onorato. "Also, at that low altitude, with very recently restarted engines, they would not have had the airspeed to 'pull out of this,' avoid the mountain and then have enough altitude and energy to make the airfield."

To get even more technical, Twardowski points out that calling for full flaps and gear down, one right after the other, at 190 knots would most likely exceed the limitations of the aircraft. "At that speed it is possible for the flaps to be ripped off the wings," he said. "I suppose, in an emergency like they were in, the pilots wouldn't care too much about exceeding limitations." In a real emergency situation, the pilot actually flying the plane would be the one calling for gear down, not the nonflying pilot.

Onorato has another gripe: "Why was the first officer reaching up to the overhead panel right in the middle of the emergency—to change the cabin temperature?" But the most glaring mistake to the trained professional? "There was propeller noise in the background—they were flying a jet airplane. I can't believe that the show thought no one would notice this," Twardowski says. —Erin Scottberg